What the hell is a progressive contrarian?
Well, when the terms left-wing and right-wing have lost any meaning whatsoever, is there any fundamental fault line that means anything politically any more? The only true differentiator is between those who believe that human progress is both desirable and possible, and those who don't.
The real split these days is between progressives and reactionaries.
And contrarian? That should speak for itself...

Friday, June 29, 2012

April to June this year has been the wettest second quarter in the UK since records began in 1910.

The story mentions the record breaking weather, highlights the disruption and so on. But it fails completely to mention the Met Office's original 'drier than usual' forecast for the period. It fails to mention the numerous predictions of warmer, drier weather thanks to climate change. In fact there's no mention of climate change at all...

Imagine if the so-called drought had carried on. Can you imagine the story not mentioning climate change if it had been about warmer, drier weather? Of course not. When mother nature refuses to play ball with the alarmist predictions it counts as weather. When it happens to coincide with some prediction than it's climate change.

Funnily enough, this is one of the stories that doesn't have room for reader comments. Wonder why that might be?

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

It was inevitable in the end that the pro-bailout parties would win in the Greek re-run elections. Far-right voters dropped Golden Dawn and switched to New Democracy, while Syriza gained more votes but not enough to completely wipe out PASOK, which they needed to do.In the end the Greek electoral system gives New Democracy 50 extra seats so that they can form a government with PASOK and/or some of the independents. Fear of the far-left, of change and of continuing turmoil still only just managed to beat Syriza.

Not that there isn't turmoil to come. The election result just postpones the final reckoning. Greece is a dead man walking and everyone knows it. Yet politicians across the world pretend to breathe a sigh of relief as though there's any hope of saving the Greek economy or, more importantly, the Euro itself.

How can we know that Greece is doomed even with the election of a collaborationist government? Because experience has shown repeatedly that you cannot impose a change on a political culture - and it's that cultural change that nobody ever talks about. Look at post-Soviet Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest - you cannot impose a new political culture from the outside. Greek political culture is about patronage and nepotism. The state is viewed as the means to influence and reward networks of friends, families, supporters. Nobody pays taxes because they know the money is there to be distributed to political supporters and friends. The brightest and best don't go into industry they flee abroad or seek a position in the civil service. It's the way to get on.

Syriza promised to go some way to making changes. It threatened the established networks of corruption that PASOK and New Democracy have erected over decades. But they didn't talk about the underlying problem which is that a core belief in statism. They didn't threaten to leave the EU or even quit the Euro. They went so far but no further but even that was enough to threaten the Greek EU class establishment.

What Greece needs is a capitalist revolution. A revolution that throws off the chains the state, that cuts back on the red tape and the layers of bureaucracy that exist to serve those networks of patronage that have kept Greece backward for so long. Sadly, the most 'radical' voices in the country seem still not to recognise that it's the state that is the problem, not the solution.